Open book tattoo with black linework, dotwork shading and pink, blue and orange watercolour splashes on the upper back.

Enlarged with AI from a smaller original

Open book with watercolour splashes

Dotwork · Back · Mixed · Photo

An open book with curled ornate page edges and a stippled spine is drawn in black linework and dotwork. Behind it, loose watercolour washes in pink, blue, teal and orange bleed outwards, with small star-like sparkles scattered across the blue area. The book sits centrally on a pale skin surface, with the colour fading into the surrounding skin at the edges.

Dotwork Back Book Open book Star Watercolour Splatter Ornament

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The pages had started to lift off the binding by the third week at sea, so Ottilie Brandt sewed them back in by lamplight, each stitch pulled tight against the ship's slow roll. Her mother's atlas, the one with the cracked green cover, had gone soft with damp, and the ink of the coastlines was running into the brown of the paper like weak tea. She worked with a bone folder and a pot of paste she had mixed from flour and clove oil, and she did not look up when the second mate came down to ask whether the book was worth the trouble.

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It was the only thing she had brought from Hull that she could not have bought again. Her uncle had given it to her on the quay with a look that said he expected her to lose it, or to lose herself in it, and she had done neither yet. Each night she read a page aloud to the cook's boy, who could not read himself, and each night the story went further than the book did. By the Azores they had sailed past every shore the atlas named.

On the night the sky split open over the Sargasso, the book fell from the table and fanned open on the boards. The pages lay flat and the lamplight caught the gilt on their edges, and across the open leaves the stars came out of the spray through the port glass, one by one, pricking the dark blue of the sea. Ottilie picked it up, pressed the spine flat with her palm, and found the coloured smear of the ocean had settled on the page like a tide mark. She left it there. Some maps, she decided, were better drawn by weather.